interior symbols burn the
cartography of her exponential map
upon the topology of his geometry
demarcating areas of profound significance
at the paradoxical barrier
of parallels crossing,
impossibilities colliding,
converging on an ancient solution

Notes: A tribute to Grigori Perelman and dVerse Poets Pub, the only place in the universe that would allow me to share poetry about mathematics. The community at dVerse literally changed the course of my life trailing joy, friendship, and love in its wake.

Share this:

Like this:

Related

15 Comments:

parallels crossing…is that even possible…smiles…love the bit of your love story in here as well anna…in the last 3 lines of stanza three…they are really cool…and hey impossibilities happen you know…smiles. the mathematician in me is rather excited…

Hi Anna…I really must be honest & say that I appreciate the art in this poem & understand that it’s message is a deep and important one; but I have no comprehension of its meaning…which does not take away from its value or the beauty of your words.

Like good food porn imagery, you write so passionately, sensually, about quantum physics, spirituality, & life beyond the linear, I swear now you have created math/physics porn, which always gets my creative juices flowing. You are a gem in the infinite cosmic charm bracelet that encircles the dVerse universe, hugs.

I admire your use of math into your poetry Anna ~ I imagine we speak the same theme but in a different language, each coming together a burning, converging of impossibilities colliding ~ Love the infinite grace of two souls bound, unraveling at the edge of imagination’s fire ~

Elegant as a zero, this poem translates truth into humaness. Ultimate poetry in these lines: “path of a lexical soul theorem
encapsulated by exotic spheres
spun – expanding and contracting
in a bounded singularity”
Beautiful poem filled with infinite grace.

There is apparently poetry in science but I must confess that this is totally lost on me. I saw a video today of a ten year old who is taking a university degree in maths and then wants to get a PHD. I am sure she sees beauty in numbers and equations.

what a brilliant man. I’ll ask a good friend who once dabbled in physics (his PhD is from Harvard and he worked at both FermiLab and SLAC) and who is a punk at heart, what he knows of Perelman. thank you for bringing him to my attention. ~

Anna, anyone that can write a poem about the paradox of parallel lines crossing wins in my book. To bring up Riemann topology and set it to a musical voice of poetry wins in my book, I look forward to read a lot more along this way, and it brings back sweet memory of my time when I was dabbling with Green’s function theory….

Isn’t it wonderful when against all odds the impossible merging is possible? I will have to remember not to fault it when the joining is only temporary, knowing that in parting we have both changed. I dodn;’t know all the concepts here, but I love how all the sounds roll together.

I can learn so much from your writing, Anna! when dverse mentioned bringing people in you were the 1st I thought about… smiles. I’m gonna bookmark this and look up a lot of these words.
I see the beauty in this poem, but have no idea what it all means 🙂

Robert Anton Wilson

Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

Witold Gombrowicz

“Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog.” Ferdydurke

I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.

Gustav Flaubert

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Dušan “Charles” Simić

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Monique Wittig

"Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it... Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being - subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say 'I' I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor. "

W.S. Merwin

All the things that really matter to us are impossible...Writing poetry is impossible. I don't know how to write a poem. A poem - there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don't know. There is so much that comes out of what we don't know and what we don't have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. - from Doing the Impossible, Yes Magazine, Issue 59

Thomas Aquinas

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.